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Our $100M Series B

oxide.computer

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Re: Our $100M Series B

#371

Post by macgillicu »

This is great. I hope they stay committed to the open source side of things, but all evidence seems to suggest they're serious about it. Generally, it's great to see a good idea getting executed well and arguably improving the state of affairs in computing, and making it, as it were.

The flat salary structure at a generous level (from my perspective, anyway) is a breath of fresh air. Everyone getting caught up on the equity is a bit hard to understand, given the clarity of the message from the company.

I will be applying for one of the open positions. Kudos to this company for their approach to business, and congrats on the success.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#372

Post by jiveturkey »

sunshowers wrote: post #362
yencabulator wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially so for Oxide's decidedly non-Linux setup. They are in a niche software ecosystem with practically no one else. Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/ (Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses Illumos" is cheating.)

> Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. I absolutely do not have a Solaris/illumos background! The first time I ever sshed into an illumos machine was my first day on the job.

The exception proves the rule. You can't deny the deep Solaris heritage.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#373

Post by yencabulator »

sunshowers wrote: post #363
yencabulator wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel. It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware e…

Yes, we're primarily an engineering company, not a research organization. It's also about what we don't have. We don't have a UEFI, for example, which means we don't have UEFI vulnerabilities.

Yeah and you're doing good work there. It just kinda annoys me when people go from "oh that's a cool company" into idolatry. 1U servers were always a poor form factor for modern day hot chips & drives. Breaking that mold has been done over and over and isn't something that should be treated as new.

Scaling from the 8U (that blades could already do in the 90s) to full rack as the unit of "slide unit in to connect" DC power and networking is way cooler than using 80mm fans.

Re UEFI: I feel like that part is less about UEFI itself and more about how you have very minimal third party firmware.

I'm pretty excited about openSIL and such in general. If only AMD could execute well in the world of software.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#374

Post by singron »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
mrcwinn wrote: post #13

Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary: >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [ https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ] Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant? I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot. Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base sa…

"total comp" (salary+equity) is really hard to quantify for a private company. In order to qualify as ISOs, the stock options need to be priced at the Fair Market Value (FMV), which makes them essentially worth ~$0 on paper on the day they are granted. In order to value them differently, you need to guess if/how the company will increase in value in the future. If the gains were guaranteed, then that should be factored into the current FMV, so options always have significant uncertainty.

This is unlike an RSU from a public company, where you can sell the value of your shares as they vest and add that to your income with minor risk of price volatility.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#375

Post by yencabulator »

ryao wrote: post #369
yencabulator wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially so for Oxide's decidedly non-Linux setup. They are in a niche software ecosystem with practically no one else. Apparently mostly because they're practically all ex-Solaris staff. https://www.illumos.org/docs/about/who/ (Listing all projects using ZFS or DTrace as "who uses Illumos" is cheating.)

I remember many Linux fans saying that monocultures were bad until Linux became so popular that Linux was the one benefiting from a monoculture. Despite that, the rationale against monocultures still applies. That said, Illumos is influential as an organ donor to many others. There are a number of awesome technologies in it.

Oh I would love to have some healthy competition to Linux, but I am not rooting for Solaris to do that, I'd rather have one of the Rust-based microkernel actually git gud. Time to shake the foundations of the age-old security and isolation models, not resuscitate a dusty old thing built on piles of C and shell on top of a large monolithic kernel and pretend everything's fine.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#376

Post by jiveturkey »

yencabulator wrote: post #345
throw0101c wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Oxide Computer, they found that going from 20mm to 80mm fans dropped their chassis power usage (efficiency is to the cube of the radius): a rack full of 1U servers had 25% of its power going to the fans, and they were able to get down to 1.2%: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTJYY_Y1H9Q From their weblog post: > Compared to a popular rackmount server vendor, Oxide is able to fill our specialized racks…

This is not any different than the "blade" form factor that was popular in the 90s. Shared power and cooling that was not constrained by the height of a 1U rack chassis, with larger fans. Hell, even Supermicro has blade-style chassis with 80mm fans. This is not novel. It's just plain old engineering, optimized to sell whole racks not individual servers or <=8U units, sprinkled with opinions about low-level firmware e…

An F1 car is also just plain old engineering, optimized to get around the track quickly, sprinkled with opinions and with a niche bespoke drivetrain. Nothing to see here.

Re: Our $100M Series B

#377

Post by mike_d »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #344
neom wrote: post #83

I'm a Bryan Cantrill fan so I'm glad this is working out, I was extremely skeptical of them at the beginning(on HN too), I think because I've built DCs for many years and was stuck in a mindset that served my use case, I've come around to Oxide. My main concerns originally were 2 fold: "this seems bougie", is there actually a market for this, and, is there a good interoperability story with mix and match. From what I…

Even if it makes no sense as a technical thing, businesses will buy it. Look at all the huge companies that keep spending millions trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time. Enterprise loves to buy big iron and self-hosting crap, so I'm sure they will be successful selling this. However, I think they're going to need to branch out to more services in order to continue increasing their revenue every year (af…

> Look at all the huge companies that keep spending millions trying to DIY their own datacenter for the 3rd time

You mean all the huge companies that ran multiple datacenters before the cloud was even a thing?

Re: Our $100M Series B

#378

Post by timerol »

Aurornis wrote: post #56
mrcwinn wrote: post #13

Everyone at Oxide makes the same salary: >We decided to do something outlandishly simple: take the salary that Steve, Jess, and I were going to pay ourselves, and pay that to everyone. [ https://oxide.computer/blog/compensation-as-a-reflection-of-... ] Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant? I thought I saw this question answered in a previous thread and the answer was basically “no”, but the question has been avoided a lot. Aspects of equity compensation would inherently need to be different over time due to valuation, fundraising stage, and so on. However I always thought it was strange that they made a big deal about paying everyone the same base sa…

> Does everyone at Oxide have the same equity grant?

> equity compensates for risk – and in a startup, risk reduces over time: the first employee takes much more risk than the hundredth.

I think that paragraph answers the question pretty clearly. As an Oxide employee you will get equity. It will generally be less than the people that came before you, but more than people that come after you. So it's obviously not the same as everyone else

Re: Our $100M Series B

#380

Post by steveklabnik »

mbjorling wrote: post #379
steveklabnik wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are! https://oxide.computer/careers

Are there any storage-related roles? Will Oxide redefine storage as well?

We don’t have any storage specific positions to my knowledge, but that falls under the control plane job, they’re the ones working on Crucible.
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